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ular materialist is still a ways off, a comparative vocabulary goes a long way in keeping theological elements from forming anti-intellectual barriers to critical scrutiny. Taking the lead from practitioners of comparative analysis in other elds (Martin Jays and Gary Guttings intellectual histories, Peter Hallwards surveys of recent French philosophy, and in a different sense, Karen Armstrongs and Robert Wrights historical syntheses of religious thought) we might develop a better understanding of how the terms of philosophy ineffability, utopia, multiplicity, presence, or the other, for examplehave decidedly secular coordinates as a vocabulary for musics intellectual history.72

Janklvitch and the Dilemma of Decadence

MICHAEL J. PURI
The musical-philosophical thought of Vladimir Janklvitch is still news to us, despite its availability for well over a half century. It is new largely because we Anglophone musicologists have yet to peruse it in breadth and depth: indicators of his limited reception within this community include the translation into English of only two of his many monographs on musicRavel (orig. 1939; trans. 1959) and Music and the Ineffable (orig. 1961; trans. 2003)as well as the publication of only a small number of texts in which musicologists have made substantial use of his work.73 Even for scholars who have already spent some time with it, however, it may continue to feel new because its concepts and methods contrast in varying degrees with those peculiar to our disciplinary habitus. Thus, as we begin a process of rapprochement with Janklvitchs work, I suggest that we acknowledge an initial ambivalence toward it and act accordingly, neither afrming it immediately for its possible redemption of our perceived shortcomings, nor rejecting it wholesale for its unpalatable alterity, but rather critically examining its elements for potential strengths and weaknesses. One of its most distinctive aspects is its dedication to French art music from about 1870 to 1940 and a penumbra of related repertoire: mainly Russian and Spanish music of the same period, as well as the work of a few important precursors (Chopin and Liszt). Janklvitch produces a detailed and insightful physiognomy of this repertoire, especially insofar as it articulates numerous counterideals to what he regarded as the awed Romantic (and largely Austro-Germanic) legacy in music and musical criticism; these counterideals
72. See Jay, Marxism and Totality ; idem, Downcast Eyes; Gutting, Thinking the Impossible; Hallward, The One or the Other; Armstrong, History of God; and Wright, Evolution of God. 73. See Janklvitch, Ravel, trans. Margaret Crosland (1959); and idem, Music and the Ineffable. Current musicological scholarship that places Janklvitchs thought at the center of its inquiry includes texts by Abbate: MusicDrastic or Gnostic? and In Search of Opera; as well as Rings, Mystres limpides ; and Puri, Memory and Melancholy in the Epilogue of Ravels Valses nobles et sentimentales.

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include inexpressivity rather than expressivity, understatement rather than hyperbole, obliquity rather than directness, fragmentation rather than continuity, concision rather than elaboration, irony rather than sincerity, and so forth.74 However, the narrowness of this focus also casts doubt upon any attempt to extend the reach of these categories by applying them to other repertoires. Further, it raises suspicions that the musical philosophy Janklvitch evidently derived from the chosen repertoire unduly elevates the latters idiomatic qualities to general principlesamong which, charm and ineffabilitythat are supposed to express our fundamental experience of and relation to all musics. Even if we were to assent to this leap, would we necessarily have to embrace and even try to replicate Janklvitchs methodology? As compelling as his rhapsodic essays may be in their effort to reap the rewards of what Michael Gallope in this colloquy calls quodditive freedom, they also seem to distance themselves from more mundane matters that are nevertheless essential to some of our own, present-day research methods: incorporation of historical fact, musics situation within a thick cultural context, and the ideological critique of attendant discourses, including ones own.75 As untroubled as the surface of his prose seems to be, nevertheless I suspect that he was anything but oblivious to the consequences of these choices. A case in point is the dilemma that the topic of decadence posed for hima topic equally promising and threatening to his ongoing musical-philosophical project. On the one hand, decadence lay at the crux of his concerns in its dual identity as both a general and a specic cultural phenomenon. When spelled in both English and French with a capital D, it was a literary and artistic movement in France that ourished from about 1880 to 1900 (with an extended dnouement) and proved formative for musicians like Debussy and Ravel.76 The Decadence upheld the countercultural impulse inherent in the more general notion of decadence by embracing hedonism, aestheticism, and ironic
74. For an account of Janklvitchs musical preferences, see Revah, Sur la partialit en musique. 75. While Janklvitchs musical writings are undoubtedly sui generis the result of an imaginative encounter among music, philosophy, and literature that can never be reproducedI would nevertheless propose that their methodology bears at least an afnity to that of Gaston Bachelard (18841962), fellow philosophy professor at the Sorbonne and author of books such as Leau et les rves ; Lair et les songes ; and La potique de lespace. Although Janklvitch does not espouse Bachelards phenomenology, he nevertheless shares his interest in identifying the archetypal images (or gestures, or elements) that govern the texts under consideration (for Bachelard, usually literature) and using these archetypes to generate a seemingly boundless array of intertextual associations and philosophical claims. Accordingly, they are vulnerable to the same criticisms of ahistoricism and subjectivism. For a useful review and critique of Bachelards method, see Hans, Gaston Bachelard and the Phenomenology of the Reading Consciousness. 76. Three indispensable sources on French Decadence and cultural decadence in general are Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects ; Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 151221; and Pierrot, Decadent Imagination, 18801900. For an extensive treatment of decadence from a current musicological perspective, see Puri, Ravel the Decadent.

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self-awareness, among other attitudes, all of which interested Janklvitch.77 On the other hand, if he tried to situate potentially Decadent musicians too rmly within this context, he would risk bogging down his narrative in the quidditive details of history and aesthetics; as he made clear in the preface to Stefan Jarocin skis book on Debussy, he preferred to maintain a certain distance from periodizations or classications (in this case, Symbolism, Impressionism, and Realism), apparently to support the claim of this musicor really any musicto a transcendence of historical particularity.78 Moreover, delving any further into the history of French Decadence would require acknowledging the strong inuence on this movement of Richard Wagner, whose presence was anathema to Janklvitch and his musical-philosophical project.79 But, most of all, I suspect that he did not want to associate his beloved music too strongly with decadence in general, since its connotations (whose negativity only increased as the n de sicle and its exaltation of the nonutilitarian faded away) were simply too widespread and enduring for him single-handedly to override. Thus, with respect to decadence and similar themes the alternative to lineffable was not lindicible but linterditthat which he forbid himself from saying. Janklvitch did, in fact, directly confront decadence in an essay he dedicated solely to this topic in 1950, which he may have undertaken in a personal attempt to come to terms with it (rather than merely performing an exercise in cultural criticism). Here, he describes decadence in broad terms as extreme civilization and characterizes it by a decline in instinct, creative vitality, virility, and innocence, as well as an increase in self-consciousness and irony, articiality of life, complexity of needs, and renement of taste.80 Moreover, a decadent civilization is one devoted to ruminating over itself (se recueillir) and is bound to the past through an obsessive, archivist memory rather than

77. Books by Janklvitch in which he addresses these themes at length include Lironie; Laventure, lennui, le srieux ; La mort ; and Lirrversible et la nostalgie. 78. This [scholarly vacillation among Symbolism, Impressionism, and Realism] only goes to prove . . . the relativity of the various categories and headings under which we were hoping to classify Debussy. He himself had a horror of concepts, and would no doubt have been the rst to express astonishment at being thus bandied about between various conicting isms. . . . Symbolism, in the profound sense in which Jarocin ski understands it, is still linked with Impressionism through the paradox of certain elusive external similarities. It is not easy to explain how this contradiction between sensorial discontinuity and the continuity of dreamsbetween scattered and disparate qualities and the uidity of a dreamcan ever be resolved. Yet, in fact, it is resolved, in the way that music sings, in the mystery of the inexpressible and the je ne sais quoi ; Janklvitch, Preface, in Jarocin ski, Debussy, xiii and xiv. 79. A standard account of Wagners association with the Decadence is Koppen, Dekadenter Wagnerismus. 80. Janklvitch, La dcadence, 362. All translations into English are mine, unless otherwise noted. A revised version of this article appears in idem, Laustrit et la vie morale. Although the revisions are not extensive, nevertheless they are potentially interesting to us for their references to music.

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envisioning the future through ardent hope.81 In art, decadence manifests itself in preciosity, ornamentation, virtuosity, the fetishization of means as ends in themselves, and the exploration of various dichotomies at their extremes majuscule vs. miniscule, expressivism vs. formalism, frenzy vs. immobility. One of the few redeeming effects it can claim is an uncommon lucidity, the consequence of a hypertrophied self-consciousness. Music did not play a central role in his essay on decadence, but his musical writings on the chosen repertoire, which stretch across the length of his career, nevertheless indicate a strong awareness of the implication of this music in decadence, as well as a conicted conscience about how he ought to deal with this. Evidence of this mindset is notable in La vie et la mort dans la musique de Debussy (1968). Soon after declaring in the Introduction that everything is agony and decadence in the n-de-sicle French artistic world in which Debussy was embedded, he pulls back slightly to assert that there is more in Debussy than a literary neurasthenia.82 In like fashionbut in reverse orderhe follows up the claim that the appeal of the decline and not-Being has nothing specically Debussyan about it with the statement that what Debussys music suggests to us, above all, is the disintegration and dissolution of matter.83 As the rst chapter draws to a close, he reafrms the decadent interpretation of Debussys music on behalf of its predilection for noons and afternoons: The decline begins at noon . . . noon sounds the slow onset of night; and, more generally, the maximum in all things announces the onset of the decadent ebb.84 But this interpretation is unsettled again once we remark that, in a revision of this chapter for Debussy et le mystre de linstant (1976), he changed its title from The Decline (Le dclin) to The Descent Underground (La descente dans les souterrains), thereby replacing a direct reference to decadence with one that somewhat conceals itself beneath eruditionhere, an allusion to the underground vaults in act 3, scene 2 of Debussys Pellas et Mlisande.85 The presence of decadence was even stronger in his 1939 monograph on Ravel. As in the Debussy volumes, in this book he explicitly associated decadence with languor, lassitude, and twilit effects in the composers early works, especially those written during the Decadence. Implicitly, however, there is a large overlap between his description of Ravels music in this book and the account of decadence he would later provide in the 1950 essay.86 One instance
81. Janklvitch, La dcadence, 365. 82. Janklvitch, La vie et la mort dans la musique de Debussy, 9 and 13, resp. 83. Ibid., 9 and 23, resp. The discussion of materiality in Debussys music is one place where Janklvitch explicitly acknowledges a debt to Bachelard. 84. Ibid., 67. 85. Janklvitch, Debussy et le mystre de linstant. 86. When Janklvitch republished his Ravel book in 1956 (the version that Crosland translated into English), he made numerous changes to every page, ranging from the alteration of a single word to the insertion of large blocks of text. Even though he published his Dcadence essay in between the two Ravel publications, his revisions only further suppress the composers decadent prole. See Janklvitch, Ravel (1956).

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of extreme civilization is the composers gluttony for novelty ( gourmandise de nouveaut ), which resulted in a harmonic language completely dominated by an insatiable curiosity that compels him toward the rarest combinations and increasingly quintessential aggregationsa classic decadent scenario in which hedonism produces overrenement.87 Another manifestation is its articiality, which Janklvitch deems the most distinctive trait of Ravels craft.88 In addition, a retrospectivist attitude is supposed to lie behind the multiple examples of pastiche in this repertoire, while, according to Janklvitch, nothing is more characteristic of Ravel than the fact that he was incomparably lucid and clearly aware of his own intentions.89 Instead of Romantic introspection and confession, Ravel demonstrates in both his life and his art an extreme modesty or shamefulness (pudeur) that exhibits itself in repressed desire, reticent friendship, strength that does not show all its power at onceall fundamental aspects of that embodiment of decadence, the Baudelairean dandy, which we know Ravel to have emulated throughout his life.90 Further, when interrupted in his sublimity, the dandy produces a music that oscillates between frenzy and impassivity.91 In these and other respects Janklvitch nds Ravels music to draw inspiration from the rococo eighteenth century, the era of the most exquisite renements of politesse, luxury, and pleasure, thereby becoming an oasis . . . a series of intermittent escapes beyond life and reality.92 While Janklvitch had not yet published his 1950 essay on decadence by the time he wrote his book on Ravel, he nevertheless managed to trace the outlines of this concept in the composers music. Even in 1939 he appears to have realized what he had done, noting midway through the book that Ravels instrumental perfection, manual dexterity, and absolute domination of material are ordinarily symptoms of decadence.93 But, even more strongly than in Debussys case, he strove to shield Ravel from this charge, drawing attention instead to a dimension of unmediated expressivity in his music (a precious movement of his heart) while also identifying what he would later call the three alibis of Ravels pudeur : naturalism [which] helps him to conceal himself, exoticism to conceal this naturalism, and pastiche to conceal this exoticism.94
87. Janklvitch, Maurice Ravel (1939), 47 and 82, resp. 88. Ibid., 62. 89. Ibid., 6. 90. Ibid., 91 and 122, resp. For a detailed account of dandyism in Ravel, see Puri, Dandy, Interrupted. 91. Janklvitch, Maurice Ravel (1939), 58. Cf. the passage from La dcadence in which he asserts that frenzy and collapse [lenlisement] . . . are the two fundamental types of decadence (356). 92. Ibid., 58 and 63, resp. 93. Ibid., 94. 94. Ibid., 94 and 103, resp. Janklvitchs substitution in 1956 of les trois exposants successifs de sa ruse, les trois alibis de sa pudeur (120) for the 1939 les trois exposants successifs de sa fraude (103) is one of many revisions apparently motivated by his self-interdiction against criticism of such a paragon in French art and culture.

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These three attempts to be elsewhere (the literal meaning of the Latin alibi ) do little to mitigate Ravels decadence: The seamless simulation of the real (naturalism) can qualify as a goal of technical perfectionism; exoticism is a basic strategy of decadent escapism; and the layering of concealments is standard protocol for the dissembling dandy. A different strategy adopted elsewhere by Janklvitch to distance Ravel from decadence is equally unsuccessful. When discussing the Trois pomes de Stphane Mallarm (1913) he uses the set of mlodies to draw a line in the sand, declaring it to break decisively with the decadent languor of the composers earlier pieces by means of its clearer textures and more incisive harmonies.95 Although the Trois pomes is certainly a mature work, it is nevertheless just as decadent as any other piece in Ravels uvre. How, indeed, could the eponymous sigh of Soupir be any more languorous, whose initial ascent toward the Ideal only heightens the melancholy effect of its subsequent collapse back upon the Real?96 Further, Ravels settings of Placet futile and Surgi de la croupe et du bond are as exquisitely precious are they are erotic. Simply put, if one is searching for a shining example of decadence in Ravels music, there is no better candidate than the Trois pomes. Decadence, like ineffability, is only one of many possible entry points into the thought of Vladimir Janklvitch, but it is a quite productive one: Its direct relevance to n-de-sicle French music gives us the opportunity to apply the knowledge and skills specic to our discipline to a critique of his musical writings; since he also addresses it in his nonmusical writings, it allows us to broaden the scope of our critique to include his work as a whole, a methodology betting such wide-ranging thought;97 as a highly ambivalent concept, it helps to expose tensions and opacities within an uvre that might otherwise seem perfectly transparent in its motivations. But adopting these critical positions should not prevent us from enjoying the insights he offers us on every page; further, the blind spots we nd could also be mirrors in which to recognize ourselves, as James Currie suggests in this colloquy. In the long process of rapprochement with Janklvitchs thought, removing it from a pedestal may ultimately bring it closer to us.

95. Ibid., 28. 96. I am simply paraphrasing the decadent interpretation of fountains that Janklvitch offers in La vie et la mort dans la musique de Debussy : The fountain itselfand this already appears in the third Pome de Baudelaireis more a collapse (croulement) than a bursting-forth ( jaillissement); 26. 97. In addition to decadence, there are other concepts in Janklvitchs philosophy that we could explore to gain further insight into his understanding of Ravel, among which conscience, irony, and the lie.